November 23, 2024
Archive for June, 2014
June 7, 2014 at 10:00 pm · Filed under Torah Portion
Numbers 13:1-15:41
This Week’s Torah Portion |June 8 – June 14, 2014 – Sivan 10 – Sivan 16, 5774
In A Nutshell
The portion begins with Moses sending the twelve heads of the tribes to spy in the land of Israel, to examine it and prepare to enter it. The spies return and describe a land flowing with milk and honey, but occupied by giants that will make it impossible to enter the land, conquer it, and rule it. Their words spread fear in the people, except for Joshua Ben Nun, and Caleb Ben Yephunneh. This angers the Creator and He wants to destroy the entire people. Moses prays and asks for mercy on the people. As a result, only the ten spies that slandered the land die in a plague. The other two, Joshua Ben Nun and Caleb Ben Yephunneh continue to accompany the people.
Later in the portion, the children of Israel trip once more and seek to run back to Egypt. In the end they repent and abort their decision. Afterward Israel make another mistake: they try to fight and conquer the land without instructions to do so, and therefore fail.
The portion ends with the instruction to wander another forty years in the desert until the entire generation of the spies passes away, except for Joshua Ben Nun, who is to lead the people into the land of Israel.
Commentary by Dr. Michael Laitman
We have to develop from our will to receive, from our ego, into a state in which we come to be “the people of Israel,” when we are all Yashar El (straight to God), having the quality of the Creator: bestowal and love. We will all be in “love your neighbor as yourself,”[1] in love of others, because we have no other choice.
We must not go by our own reason, which alternates between dictations to advance and retreat. Rather, we must fight while examining if we are doing what is right, and if the way is right. The portion explains that we cannot know what to do or even where to start. It is a problem because we are accustomed to work by the mode of “A judge has only what his eyes see.”[2] It seems as though we must advance by following our essence, according to our Kelim (vessels/tools), using our minds and hearts.
The Creator demands that we develop and do something. But how can we do something if we cannot tell between right and wrong, if we do not know whether to move forward into war or run back to Egypt? We can see that there are giants in the land of Israel. And while there are also fruits there, we cannot tell who rules there, which desires, or how big they are.
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June 7, 2014 at 9:00 pm · Filed under Definitions
The Land of Canaan
We are immersed in the desire. All we have is a desire that must be corrected from harming others into doing good to them. The land of Canaan is that desire when it is still uncorrected but is about to be corrected.
Forty Days
Forty is the degree of Bina. The gap between Malchut and Bina is called “forty.” It is the gap between the will to receive, the ego, and the degree of faith, Bina, the level of bestowal.
Flowing with Milk and Honey
Milk and honey represent the abundance we receive in the corrected desire.
Amalek
Amalek is the foundation of all evil, it is the intention to receive in order to receive, which exists within our nature.
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June 7, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Perception of Reality
Why You Can Never See or Imagine Anything Outside Your ‘Black Box’
A person is like a “black box,” feeling, understanding and receiving only what enters from outside. All of our investigations are limited by our five senses, and every instrument we have built and will build in the future, ceases to escape our five senses’ limits. Our five senses’ limits are merely expanded through these instruments.
This is because we can never imagine what our five senses lack. Namely, what other additional sense we need in order to perceive the true reality around us. We feel no lack for this, as we feel no lack of a sixth finger on our hands. That for which we feel no lack, can never be something to which we would come to request. Therefore, all of the investigations of our world are only according to our five senses, and we can never begin to see, feel and understand what is beyond our senses. These are the limitations of our conceptions.
Also, our imagination is the product our five senses, and the experiences which stem from them. We can never imagine any object or creature which does not resemble that which is familiar to us from our five senses.
If I want, for example, someone to draw for me some creature from another planet, certainly he would draw it according to the elements which are familiar to us from our world. And if I asked you to describe something imaginary you would give me, without a doubt, something which is very similar to this world.
How to Understand the Boundary of Your Perception
All this exemplifies our limitations: we all live in a small world, and we are unable to feel, and therefore imagine, anything outside of it. Moreover, since our limitations are absolute, no science or philosophy can ever help us understand what is beyond this world.
It could be that in the same space, in other dimensions exist other creatures and worlds. We cannot feel them because we lack the requisite senses or “vessels” to feel them. It could be that in this other world that is vaster than ours is to be found the reason for our existence, for all of the incidences which occur to us, and the reason for our death. And we, oblivious of these causes, live without true knowledge and without a true goal, unconscious in our world.
There are people in our world who do receive additional senses with which to feel the wider surrounding existence. These people are called “Kabbalists” (“receivers”) since they know how to receive higher knowledge than ours.
Kabbalists say that there are worlds above ours, and that all these worlds are like the layers of an onion, in which our world is found in the midst of all of these worlds. We, who live in this world, according to our inborn senses, are able to feel only this world.
The Kabbalists tell us that “this world” is called so, because it is just a small fragment of the vast reality that exists outside our current sensation of reality. If we could develop additional senses, then what we would feel with them would be called the “higher world,” or the “spiritual world.” The sole purpose of the wisdom of Kabbalah is to develop these additional senses with which we can gain a clear perception and sensation of the higher reality.
If you’re interested in the wisdom of Kabbalah and everything it has to offer at a deeper level, we recommend starting with a beginner course in the fundamentals of Kabbalah. Courses are free, and there are self-study video classes available to start immediately, as well as a live course that starts on Wednesday, June 11, 2014. Sign Up For A Free Course Here »
June 6, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles
By realizing our purpose in life, we attain perfection, tranquility, unbounded enjoyment and the ability to transcend time and space while still living in this world. Everyone will reach this awareness, and there are two ways to reach it…
The wisdom of Kabbalah reminds us that human desires progress from simple desires, animal desires—for sex, for shelter, food, family—and when these are satified, we move on to a greater desire, a desire for wealth. When this desire for wealth feels empty, we move on to a desire for fame and/or power. Once we fill that, we are moved on by our emptiness into knowledge. And once we find knowledge empty, we find ourselves in a confusing situation in which nothing from this world can satisfy us. It is at that point at which a completely new level of development becomes accessible to us characterized by a radically different type of desire that will change everything within the human heart.
Up until this time the human heart (when we hear the term “heart” in Kabbalah, it means the sum total of all our desires) is still filled with desires that come from the physical world such as those discussed above. This radically different desire, which is a desire to reach the spiritual, is called “Israel”—from two Hebrew words, Yashar (straight), and El (God)—a desire for a direct connection with Creator, the quality of love and bestowal. The corporeal desires are called nations, the nations of the world, in other words, the desires of the physical world.
Up until this point, the force of development—by way of physical desires—happened unconsciously. But from now on it has to happen in consciously because this new desire, also known as the “point in the heart,” is a spiritual gene and it is like the embryo of the soul. The soul is a desire and it must be filled; the heart must be filled with this desire; it must fill everything despite these corporeal desires. In other words, all of the desires we have need to undergo a transformation, a correction. It is by correcting these desires that the desire to go directly to God can be fulfilled.
Why Does the Attainment of Spirituality Require a Correction of Our Desires?
In our original state, at the root of our soul, we were connected to the Creator as the Creator and the creature. And here, we were all adhered to the Creator as one being, as one unified creature. But because of the Thought of Creation, which is to create a creature and fill it with delight, that was only the starting point; it was the beginning of the system. The quality of the creature which is the will to receive, started to expand purposefully, and as a result of the expansion of this quality, of this desire to receive for myself alone, an ever increasing difference in quality started to grow between the quality of the Creator (which is bestowal), and the quality of the creature (which is reception).
As this egoistic intention expanded in the first creature, the collective soul called Adam ha Rishon (the first man) descended through a system of worlds, through 125 steps to greater and greater egoism until the soul reached a point in which it became separated into what appears to be physicality. That is, the collective soul was shattered into 600,000 parts, each one of these parts having a piece of the original; each one of these parts being a desire. This is only the half-way point of a process—this broken, shattered aspect of the collective soul in which we experience isolation and separation from each other, a kind of antagonism towards each other, and a desire to exploit each other. This is the half-way point and it is going to be corrected. It is going to rise back up through this system of worlds, back into this state of adhesion with the Creator but it can’t do it all at once. So purposefully, it was broken into 600,000 parts.
Each one of these parts was likewise broken down into 613 desires. That is, each individual desire within Adam ha Rishon consists of 613 desires that can be corrected; the parts are small enough. It’s like dividing a huge treasure and giving a coin to each person knowing that each one will return this quality of bestowal. This point in the heart that’s placed inside of a person can be trusted to bring that point back to its origin and put the treasure back together as a collective once again.
Thus, in the point in the heart of the individual who begins to feel this desire for spirituality, this coin from the treasure of the King, plus the 612 other desires that exist in the heart must be transformed bit by bit to resemble to a greater degree the quality of the Creator, to reverse this process.
2 Ways Correction Happens: Painfully or through Attainment
This process of the return to our source and correction (Tikkun), of fulfillment of the Thought of Creation, is going to happen, and all of us, all 600,000 pieces of the collective soul are going to rejoin, and are going to ascend from physical selfish perceptions in a world of suffering, back into a complete whole inter-relationship with each other. In this way we reach the goal of creation, which is adhesion to the Creator and the complete filling of the greatest unbounded desire. It’s going to happen.
But the question is, will it happen consciously, with our agreement, or will we be pushed to it? There is one goal, which is assured, but there are two paths to the goal: One path involves going through the motions unaware of what is causing them, and how to use them optimally to realize life’s best state; the other path involves gaining awareness and insight into the cause and best possible way to relate to reality, and thus achieve the goal in the fastest and most pleasurable way possible.
If you’re interested in the wisdom of Kabbalah and everything it has to offer at a deeper level, we recommend starting with a beginner course in the fundamentals of Kabbalah. Courses are free, and there are self-study video classes available to start immediately, as well as a live course that starts on Wednesday, June 11, 2014. Sign Up For A Free Course Here »
June 5, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Why Kabbalah Is the Method that Opens Your Eyes
The Kabbalistic knowledge we possess is a result of Kabbalistic investigations performed by those people whose souls were burning with the question regarding the meaning of existence. They used a special method to begin to feel the comprehensive reality, and they wrote books about what they discovered. When Kabbalists first sense the complete reality, they call it “the opening of the eyes.”
The opening of the eyes is a process of climbing up the same degrees by which we all came down from the previously mentioned infinite state (Ein Sof). The wisdom of Kabbalah comprises two parallel orders:
1. From Above downward—the descent of the will to receive from Ein Sof through all the Upper Worlds down to “this world.”
2. From below upward—the ascent of the researcher from this world, through the barrier, to the Upper Worlds, to Ein Sof.
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